


blood of the covenant, water of the womb

by limerental



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Ghost Renfri, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Magical Pregnancy, Mpreg, Renfri | Shrike Deserves Better (The Witcher)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:13:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26636407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: “Spoken like the beast the world will believe you to be. But we both know you’re no beast, my dear. Simply a victim of circumstance, as I was. No beast at all.”“Quit blabbering,” said Geralt. “Let me guess. Find a way to lift the curse, and you sway the masses in my favor.”Stregobor’s pleasant smile deepened his rosy cheeks.“No, no, I know how to end my affliction. Now that you are here, it will not be long.”
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Renfri | Shrike, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Stregobor
Comments: 7
Kudos: 39





	blood of the covenant, water of the womb

**Author's Note:**

> please heed warnings!!
> 
> the geralt/stregobor is imagined renfri-inflicted pov non-con and this fic contains a fair bit of grisly pregnancy body horror imagery and gore
> 
> this was largely a visceral nope response to that pairing as a concept and built from a joke as many of my fics are (saying strego too many times and thinking... prego strego) 
> 
> anyway this is about renfri, as it should be
> 
> If you would like to skip the non con scene, it begins "If she willed it, it would go like this" and ends "Suffer as only women did, swollen like ripe fruit soon to split beneath the sun."

Her blood remained in the street for a week and a day, a swollen black tar-stain in the dust that boots hallowed and did not touch, and then on the eighth day, the villagers woke to a blue haze of rain that licked the stain red again in rivulets. They kept to their observance of striding around the dried pool but misremembered where her body had lain. Their soles pressed into the fading memory of her and scuffed deep.

Her body remained in the tower for only a night, burned quick and thorough after what horrible thing it did to the Master.

Two strong men from the village had drawn it up out of the slums, shuffling arm and leg, borne swaddled in an old quilt to keep the blood from their hands. Others watched from doorways and crouched in windows, mothers pressing their children behind them, tucking their faces into their aprons, as the men carried the body to the wizard’s tower.

The body did not lay long on the slab, limbs skewed and haphazard, before the Master came to see it. He folded his spidery hands behind his back and looked down his nose. He peered with a lens at the tear at the neck, the black blood, the bulged, glassy eyes. He hummed in the back of his throat and wrote a note or two in scrawling script. He bent with a scalpel to cut the body’s clothing free, and there, he made the mistake of pressing the bare seat of his palm to the inside of her cool thigh.

The Master did not have time or opportunity to spread open the body’s stiffening legs, for his own body was suddenly aflame. He screamed in wretched agony as the curse slid black up the veins of his wrists and struck his heart and pulsed through the tributaries of his arteries.

Stregobor howled and gestured, and the body caught in blue tongues of fire and burned at once to ash.

The ash remained on the slab another night before attendants stooped into the room to sweep and dispose of it.

 _The Master is not well,_ muttered the attendants, young girls with covered hair and grey skirts who pushed their brooms through the white, charred dust that had been the body. They had not been told what they were cleaning, giggling as they bent together, one talking about the village boy she was sneaking off to see this evening, one admonishing her, sincerity lost to a breath of laughter. _If the Master does not require either of us through the night, that is. He’s not well, but he may still--_

The girls did not notice a wind stir the fine ash on the blackened slab. Did not see the third figure that stood beside them, the black grin split on the white of her neck, the black hair, black eyes, black sun.

Renfri remained in the tower for nearly nine turns of the moon until, at last, the sky bled crimson and the atmosphere burned and the sun swelled and burst and not a thing remained at the end of it all, not a thing.

* * *

The Witcher was four months from Blaviken when the summons came.

_The Master is not well. A curse. Come at once. You will be rewarded._

Geralt of Rivia took his time trailing back down from the northern mountains where he had fled. Word of the bloody massacre in Blaviken spread slowly and imperfectly, but in time, it touched even the outskirts. Beady eyes scrutinized and dissected him. Narrowed gazes followed him. A leatherworker’s wife spat phlegm at his feet when he asked after repairs. An alderman tipped his head, peering through the cracked door, and lied that another was dealing with the ghouls in the backfield.

The streets of Blaviken stood empty as the Butcher rode through them, but here and there, villagers peered beneath their shutters, children’s fingers curled around the doorjambs and windowsills to catch a glimpse of him. His mare’s nostrils flared over the strange hum in the atmosphere. A stormcloud crackled above the wizard’s tower, boiling with red fissures.

A girl met him at the entrance to the tower. For a moment, he thought-- but no, she was unfamiliar, buck-toothed and red-haired.

“The Master has been greatly afflicted,” said the girl, taking the reins of his mare as he dismounted.

“What sort of affliction?”

“He is unwell.”

“For how long?”

“Ages,” said the girl. “You sure took your time coming.”

“I’m not a dog that can be summoned.”

“But you came,” she said with all the raised chin smugness of a child who still wished to please her Master, even though the smell of piss and sweat and the sickly-sweet sight of him terrified her, wanted him to lay his skeletal hand on her hair and say _good girl, good girl_ and press a coin firmly into her palm.

“Yes,” said the Butcher, grief and regret pulling his breath tight, even as his expression stayed slack. He swept a hand down the crest of his mare’s neck in farewell and stepped into the tower to answer his summons.

* * *

She watched from the tower.

She loomed and hovered and whispered, watching the Butcher ride to the tower.

She watched from the tower as he pushed back his black hood over white hair.

She tapped her fingernails against the wizard’s pristine throat, whispering, cursing, tasting his fear, his pained sweat. Beneath the curtain of his careful illusions, he bruised and shrank and swelled. She cupped a cold, corpse hand on the back of his neck. She whispered rather than howled.

Renfri watched from the tower.

The Butcher climbed the stairs.

* * *

Stregobor reclined behind an illusion in a luxurious bedchamber, his hands folded in the richly-colored blankets pooled in his lap. A sweet-smelling summer breeze drifted through the room but did not touch the curtains of the four-poster bed or ruffle the wizard’s beard. It nearly masked the scent of the rippling, burning clouds above and the sour stink of illness.

Geralt knew it to be an illusion. Though his cheeks were rosy and flushed with youth, Stregobor’s eyes tensed at the corners, pupils wide with a seeping pain that could not be fully masked. A tightness in the jaw betrayed the wizard’s easy, timeless smile. He waved with open palm to a chair beside the bed, the gesture not as silky smooth as he intended it.

Geralt did not take a seat, standing behind the chair instead, his knuckles curled white around the back.

“My dear Witcher,” said the wizard, and his voice held no strain, clear and cool, “what a sight you are after all this time.”

“Can’t say the same,” he said.

“You wound me, Butcher.”

“If only.”  
“Spoken like the beast the world will believe you to be. But we both know you’re no beast, my dear. Simply a victim of circumstance, as I was. No beast at all.”

“Quit blabbering,” said Geralt. “Let me guess. Find a way to lift the curse, and you sway the masses in my favor.”

Stregobor’s pleasant smile deepened his rosy cheeks.

“No, no, I know how to end my affliction. Now that you are here, it will not be long.”

“How do you know?”

“She asked for you. She told me it would not be long.”

“She?”

The illusion flickered, pink flush giving way to a waxy grey, black veins, blood-split whites of the eye.

“She wants you and I and all the world to suffer as she has suffered,” said the wizard, and when he grinned, his gums bled crimson between the yellowed glaze of his teeth. “I was right all along. She wore the skin of a girl, but inside? Inside she was--”

* * *

\-- charred black and soot-heavy and on fire.

She watched over the wizard’s shoulder.

She watched the Butcher’s white bone hands tighten on the back of the offered chair. His callouses had once caught on the slick dip of her spine. The firelight in the leaning fingers of the trees, smoke spreading through the cracks in the boughs. She remembered callouses pressed against the swell of her breasts, and she remembered the fire.

Renfri watched.

* * *

If she willed it, it would go like this:

Slip into the blank hollow of his eyes and whisper a suggestion. Take his limbs and possess them. His grooves and sinew giving to the shape of her, his body becoming her body.

She had watched herself ragdoll in the crook of his arm, in the dirt, in the quilt that bound and bore her up into the tower. She had watched her body burn on a slab where other women had given up their entrails. She saw the imprint of them as her body burned. The tremble of their spread thighs, the glint of a speculum, the warp of their red mouths open and echoing.

If she willed it, she could step into the Butcher’s body.

He was strong, and the wizard weakened.

She would flex his muscles and reach with his white-bone hands to grasp Stregobor by the neck and shake him. Ragdoll. Weak as a kitten. Thin fingers scrabbling against the strong forearms that pinned and adjusted his body. Weak as a little girl held by the back of the neck in the thorny swallow of underbrush.

If she willed it, she would breath through the Butcher’s mouth, hot breath on the wizard’s throat. She would take his big hands and make them hers to swallow the frail hipbones, twisting, demanding, and she would take the hard jut of his penis and hold it like a covenant against the wizard’s spine.

She could imagine it, the milk-white hair spilling loose over the wizard’s pained, taut mouth. The violence that a body could so easily do to another body. Wet smile of a wound forced and torn.

She remembered how soft that hair had felt against her breastbone. She remembered the pleasant scratch of stubble alongside the give of gentle lips. She had known then the choice that he would make before he made it. She had known by the sweet, wordless things that his body so deliberately did to her body.

If she willed it, she would hold Geralt’s body like a noose around Stregobor’s weeping throat and make the choice for him. Suffer as women did. Suffer as she had, when she was still a woman.

And she would have, she would have, if it weren’t for the babe.

Suffer as only women did, swollen like ripe fruit soon to split beneath the sun.

* * *

“No more illusions, Stregobor,” said Geralt, voice tightened to a growl. “No more smoke and mirrors. No more bullshit.”

Like asking a snake not to bite, a scorpion not to sting.

But Stregobor’s affliction sapped and drained his power, and releasing the mirage was as easy as exhaling.

The flush waned. The summer breeze stilled and curdled. Cheeks hollowed and lips cracked. Black veins crawled along the throat and temple and skeletal backs of his folded hands. The illusion melted the fat from his cheeks and the luster from his combed hair. He shrank to the sallow pallor of a days old corpse, and in the way of decomposition, his gut distended and strained.

“Were you aware,” asked Stregobor, attempting detached indifference as he lifted a trembling hand to spread over the swell of his abdomen, “that our young Renfri was with child on the morning that you slayed her? Or nearly so. I did not have the time to do a proper examination. By my estimation, it would have been mere hours since conception.”

“Speak sense. No more drivel.”

“I can speak all the sense I want, but in turn, the listener must have enough sense to comprehend it.”

“Explain this. No riddles. No pretty words.”

“I have explained.”

“Explain better. Like I’m the village imbecile.”

“That won’t be a hardship.”

“ _Now_.”

“I have been afflicted by a parasite. A dreadfully commonplace one. Extraordinary only in that the limits of my anatomy should have dissuaded it from catching. And that there are no known records of such a thing being spread by a simple touch. Especially via a corpse.”

“Stregobor.”

“I was right all along. Only something truly monstrous could have done this. Only something backwards and misaligned in every way. Our Renfri was a monster, and unless something drastic is done, she will bear another. Or, more succinctly, I will. She desired that I suffer as only women do.”

“You are--”

“With child. Her child and yours.”

“Impossible.”

“I was not wrong about our Renfri. I carry the proof of her monstrosity. I was not wrong.”

“Why am I here?”

“She wants you here.”

“She’s dead.”

“Only just.”

“I killed her.”

“Only parts of her.”

“What does she want with me?”

“She wants you to suffer. She wants us all to suffer. And shortly, we will. It’s only a matter of time now. Unless you assist me and put an end to it.”

* * *

She did not know how it had come to be and did not care.

The babe coiled in the wizard’s gut. The inexplicable babe. _Her_ babe. Renfri listened to the patter of its heartbeat like rain against a darkened windowpane and would have wept if she could still weep. It clung, parasitic, beneath the spokes of ribs, pressed its body out against the swell of the flesh that cocooned it. It drained sustenance from black veins and raked its claws and gnawed and batted with limbs that gained more strength by the day.

Soon.

It reached the limits of its gestation. It stretched the boundaries of a body not built to suffer like this, inky-black pseudo-womb rippling with a veil of magic.

Impossible babe. Her sweet babe.

The monstrosity that they had thought she was.

Renfri watched it balloon the swollen gut and tear a space for itself between throbbing organs.

Her babe, fanged and hungry.

The affliction had not magicked its host the necessary anatomy. Only the facsimile of a womb. Aching pelvis too narrow. No external channel. Birth must carve its own exit wound. Egg-toothed babe. Impossible babe.

Soon.

* * *

It was the wizard’s pride that was his undoing.

“Why me?” asked the Butcher, a scalpel pressed into his steady hand.

Stregobor’s glassy eyes blinked in the wan depression of their sockets. Beneath the taut skin of his bared abdomen, something writhed. Black veins pulsed.

“The child is your own blood. Your offspring. Your responsibility.”

He was afraid.

More afraid for the pristine state of his manhood than for his life. Too ashamed to call in another mage or a village midwife to carve into his body. He had sequestered himself here, hidden. His attendants knew of their Master’s sickness but not its source.

It was his last mistake.

Stregobor feared shame more than he feared the creature he had named Butcher.

* * *

The choice was this:

“Geralt,” she whispered without stirring the flyaway hair behind his ear. She had learned how to speak again through the burned out specter of her not-body but only just, voice scratching over hot coals.

If she willed it, she could take the hand that held the scalpel and lance it through the wizard’s heart.

But not until the babe was free.

She touched his thoughts.

Her blood had remained in the street for a week and a day, but still it stained the meat of his hands. He saw her glass-eyed like a gutted fish. Black stain of a middling evil.

“Butcher,” she breathed with something that was not breath.

Sweat beaded on the wizard’s brow, and the babe lurched, ever stronger, tear of talons, gnash of jaws.

The abomination that they had thought she was.

She watched Geralt’s hand twitch, the scalpel dip to bead a red mark against skin stretched thin enough to tear with only a ghost of pressure.

The babe swelled beneath the blade.

Did it know him? Did it remember, as she did, the touch of his hands?

* * *

Stregobor’s screams rattled the tower to its marrow.

The scalpel pressed in.

Claws caught on the tear and unfurled.

The hinge of the babe’s jaws yawned and devoured.

The sky burnt black.


End file.
